[bko]

Maybe. The reason I think it's more about purpose than attention and social acceptance is that Twitter is probably the platform with the most vocal social activism and its relatively pseudonymous. So your Twitter profile doesn't really carry any weight in real life social interactions, so it's less signaling than something like Instagram. And twitter is pretty ephemeral as well, so attention doesn't stay. I've seen someone with 15 followers dunk on some popular figure on Twitter, get mentioned in the NY Times (which is pretty weird) and they gain maybe 5 or 10 followers. I'm not even exaggerating. So it's not even 15 minutes of fame. It's nothing

People find purpose in dunking on others and they do it almost as a job. They even give up other social obligations and post regularly between certain hours.